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intellectual
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
intellectual
I.adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
an intellectual/physical/technical etc challenge
▪ I love the physical challenge of climbing.
emotional/intellectual/spiritual nourishment
▪ a child starved of emotional nourishment
intellectual curiosity
▪ Highly intelligent people are full of intellectual curiosity.
intellectual property
intellectual snobbery
▪ intellectual snobbery
intellectual snobs
▪ a bunch of intellectual snobs
intellectual/academic ability
▪ No one doubts his intellectual abilities.
▪ A degree is evidence of your academic ability in a particular subject area.
mental/physical/intellectual etc incapacity
▪ Evidence of his mental incapacity was never produced in court.
political/intellectual/cultural etc ferment
▪ the artistic ferment of the late sixth century
the intellectual climate (=the general way of thinking)
▪ New inventions can change the intellectual climate.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
ability
▪ He says he wanted to find out if he had the intellectual ability to complete a degree starting from nothing.
▪ Almost all of the identified work-inhibited students had average to superior intellectual ability scores.
▪ Relaxation or withdrawal of treatment before mid-childhood has been associated with a further decline in intellectual ability.
▪ Only one student had a score that fell below the average range, and most had above-average intellectual ability scores.
▪ He combined outstanding intellectual ability with a vigorous, highly disciplined, and formidable personality.
▪ Mills refers to this intellectual ability as a certain flexibility or quality of the mind.
▪ It is difficult to conceive of such thinking taking place without the growth and development of intellectual ability.
▪ The issue of intellectual ability is especially important when considering the prevalence of mild dementia.
activity
▪ Tests show that many intellectual activities are highly correlated.
▪ Affect is responsible for the activation of intellectual activity and for the selection of which objects or events are acted on.
▪ The level of intellectual activity there.
▪ It refers to observable behaviors-sensorimotor and conceptual-that reflect intellectual activity.
▪ This intellectual activity was partly no doubt prompted by the blatant individualism of the New Right.
▪ It determines what contents intellectual activity focuses on.
▪ He kept repeating: sustained intellectual activity.
▪ Question Two: Do boys and girls participate equally in both physical and intellectual activities?
capacity
▪ I probably felt that you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, thought that the task was beyond my intellectual capacity.
▪ Furthermore, the size and weight of the brain are not the only determinants of intellectual capacity.
▪ The short answer to this question is no: it is not something which demands special intellectual capacity.
▪ Excellence continued to be defined in terms of intellectual capacity in theoretical or abstract analysis and not in terms of the practical application of knowledge.
▪ Paganism and extreme idolatry are indicative of a low level of intellectual capacity and of a limited concern for human welfare.
challenge
▪ There is, she says, little intellectual challenge, hardly any praise, not even much blame.
▪ Lent was also the season when the Church confronted perhaps its most vexing intellectual challenge.
▪ Problems, puzzles and policy issues Puzzles are mental tasks or games that present some intellectual challenge but are easily solved.
▪ Judge Bork responded that it was the intellectual challenge that appealed to him.
▪ But pleasure, and intellectual challenge, is in response to individual installations rather than to the exhibition as a whole.
▪ They could see how much they enjoyed actually selling and missed its intellectual challenge and glamor.
▪ There is no serious intellectual challenge to it.
▪ It did not present the kind of intellectual challenges that had attracted me into science.
climate
▪ The affinities between music and poetry have been familiar since antiquity, though they are largely ignored in the current intellectual climate.
▪ Similarly, Labour in 1964 won because its message was in tune with the prevailing intellectual climate.
▪ Nevertheless, the intellectual climate of the Cortes of Cadiz was anti-aristocratic.
curiosity
▪ Finally, she lists the intellectual pursuit model, which is self-directed and self-motivated by intellectual curiosity.
▪ It is rich in intellectual curiosity and academic and cultural diversity.
▪ Where were the important elements: inventiveness, initiative, adaptability, intellectual curiosity, sensitivity, confidence, determination?
▪ This was a matter of both intellectual curiosity and national security.
▪ A shy, self-effacing man, Williams was self-taught, and showed an independent and determined intellectual curiosity.
▪ There is far more high-mindedness, racial tolerance and intellectual curiosity than you might expect.
▪ These investigations of the sun's luminosity are not just intellectual curiosity.
▪ Chimp behavior holds insights into teaching humans self-esteem, intellectual curiosity and the ability to get along with others, she says.
development
▪ The co-option of an academic may well be a statement about the way in which the school values intellectual development.
▪ Levels of intellectual development vary considerably among children.
▪ But now the struggle is for methodology to really be geared towards stimulating intellectual development and problem solving.
▪ Accordingly, differences in prior experiences can contribute to individual differences in intellectual development.
▪ For themostpart she was portrayed as a frivolous ingenue whose emotional and intellectual development was gently guided by her serious-minded husband.
▪ Vygotsky was concerned with the question of how social and cultural factors influence intellectual development.
▪ The relationship between early sensorimotor development and later intellectual development has been established.
▪ These changes in structures are a major aspect of intellectual development.
effort
▪ Most of them applied themselves to their exercise books, their faces contorted with intellectual effort.
▪ The central aim in intellectual effort is to live as fully as possible.
▪ No intellectual effort need therefore be wasted on this bit of ruling-class chatter.
▪ It was a mystery that had eluded the intellectual efforts of Isaac Newton and teased the mind of Albert Einstein.
▪ Natural language indexing tends to shift the intellectual effort necessary for effective retrieval to the end-user.
▪ The low level of intellectual effort was shocking.
▪ Yet it is not a picture of some one taking things easy: rather of continual, if misdirected, intellectual effort.
elite
▪ The opposition mostly represents the upper-middle class and intellectual elite.
▪ In this area, change is very slow, and is confined almost entirely to the intellectual elite.
▪ The source of objective legal rules thus appears to be the fully developed rationality of the intellectual elites of different nations.
ferment
▪ It was an age of intellectual ferment too.
freedom
▪ What, though, are the connections between criticism and this sense of intellectual freedom embedded in higher education?
▪ Books can be dangerous because the reading and writing of them involves us in an exercise of intellectual freedom.
▪ On the issue of intellectual freedom, however, contrasts begin to appear.
▪ It was against a Jesuit who had written about comets and was a manifesto for intellectual freedom in science.
growth
▪ They felt a need to reorder a broken world, a need that contributed greatly to their intellectual growth.
▪ Reading, which in other settings has promoted the intellectual growth of a people, now threatens to arrest it.
▪ Learning, education, and intellectual growth in most cases were restricted to the period from childhood to young adulthood.
▪ Either of these extremes would result in abnormal intellectual growth.
history
▪ Contemporary intellectual history is an element in my present enterprise, though the very recent past is hard to see clearly.
▪ Male philosophers have, in effect, been doing so since the beginning of intellectual history.
inquiry
▪ It insisted on wholly open intellectual inquiry, and on a related entire tolerance.
level
▪ These differences are perhaps more acute on an intellectual level than in reality.
▪ She also figured out that she wanted to work with people on an emotional as well as an intellectual level.
▪ She's a pretty child, but hardly his intellectual level, I should have thought.
▪ Geoffroy's challenge had a significance beyond the purely intellectual level.
life
▪ How different Oxford was from Nebraska ... Oxford, the very centre of intellectual life.
▪ While Cooley bets his intellectual life upon inquiry that depends upon such methods, these strategies for learning may fall away.
▪ In the United States the graduate school is the major arena of pedagogic activity and intellectual life.
▪ I wanted an urban and intellectual life, not the desolation of a small farm.
▪ On the other hand there was a great surge of Left-wing sentiment in the political and intellectual life of the labour movement.
▪ The best demonstration that an academic person cares about others is sharing an active intellectual life.
▪ It was imaginatively true also in commerce and industry, in religious and intellectual life, and in the arts.
▪ He shares his intellectual life with literary scholars rather than the great sociologists.
property
▪ Effective intellectual property protection underpins this continued research and development.
▪ This agreement obliges countries to have measures for the intellectual property protection of plant varieties.
▪ The law of confidence can be a very useful adjunct to other intellectual property rights.
▪ He has traveled widely, lecturing on such obscure but important topics as cryptography, intellectual property and cognitive theory.
▪ He has, he says, no wish to compromise the commercial and intellectual property rights of the research based pharmaceutical companies.
▪ Since the world economy now rests more on brains than on brawn, intellectual property protection is crucial to honest trade.
stimulation
▪ A less complimentary analysis might be that value was placed on this because intellectual stimulation was at a premium on that unit.
▪ But there was next to no creative intellectual stimulation.
▪ Literature on Guillain-Barré syndrome places a high value on planning and implementing a programme to promote intellectual stimulation.
▪ They can be valuable purely as a means of providing social companionship, activities of all descriptions, and intellectual stimulation.
tradition
▪ Leese's idiosyncratic views on race derived from his own experiences rationalized in terms of a particular intellectual tradition.
▪ To split up work into its components mirrored the intellectual tradition of calculus.
▪ Scholars in certain intellectual traditions may be less prepared for everyday life than those in current political leadership.
work
▪ It may seem pretentious to say so but it is intended in Gramsci's terms as an organic intellectual work.
▪ They will inform my intellectual work.
▪ In St Luke's Hospital he would not have been allowed to engage in demanding intellectual work.
▪ Whether they choose to engage in serious intellectual work or not is up to them.
▪ He never recovered, and for the rest of his life was incapable of intellectual work.
▪ Reading this book, I am struck by how much intellectual work can revolve around playing with blocks.
▪ Defining the academic too narrowly can leave many without intellectual work to do.
▪ Doing intellectual work, I have always known, also makes things better for me.
PHRASES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
mental/intellectual/moral gymnastics
▪ I changed into my running clothes and did three miles while I went through the mental gymnastics of getting the case organized.
▪ None the less, great feats of mental gymnastics were per-formed to make them into atmospheric phenomena.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ She likes reading those trendy intellectual magazines about politics and society.
▪ the intellectual development of children
▪ There seemed to be remarkably few cultural or intellectual events for the undergraduates at the university.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Accordingly, differences in prior experiences can contribute to individual differences in intellectual development.
▪ It could have defended the frontiers, repressed religious intolerance and done something to accelerate economic and intellectual progress.
▪ It gives us everything from our connection to the outside world to our artistic and intellectual systems.
▪ She's a pretty child, but hardly his intellectual level, I should have thought.
▪ The fundamental issue in the current debate is whether environmental lead causes intellectual impairment or behavioural disturbances in children.
▪ The libretto and music, completed in 1928, came from the rambunctious intellectual environment of Paris between the two world wars.
▪ This intellectual activity was partly no doubt prompted by the blatant individualism of the New Right.
▪ Thus, the roots of all intellectual development are in early sensorimotor behavior.
II.noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADJECTIVE
great
▪ Stop thinking you're some great displaced intellectual all the time.
leading
▪ Like Dean Inge, the careers and culture of leading medical intellectuals displayed distinctive connections between science and morality.
▪ He enjoyed his social life with leading intellectuals and noblemen, where there was much debate, all without rancour.
▪ Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus, who died in 1308, was no dunce - he was a leading church intellectual.
▪ Other leading intellectuals were also told to leave the party and their job.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ It's an organization of writers, artists and intellectuals, who come together to discuss their ideas.
▪ Soviet intellectuals helped change the political climate of the country.
▪ The restaurant was once the meeting place for leading French left-wing intellectuals such as Sartre and de Beauvoir.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Both were ambitious, leery of intellectuals, and contemptuous of liberals, whom they thought were hypocrites.
▪ It was not long before such people became the butt of the intellectuals.
▪ Park imprisoned dissenters, including opposing politicians, intellectuals, and journalists.
▪ Some intellectuals of the Cold War vintage support the bill ardently.
▪ The reaction from most intellectuals to these three cases has either been approval or silence.
▪ The third task of universities is a sort of Olympic games for intellectuals.
Related phrases:
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Intellectual

Intellectual \In`tel*lec"tu*al\, n.

  1. The intellect or understanding; mental powers or faculties.

    Her husband, for I view far round, not nigh, Whose higher intellectual more I shun.
    --Milton.

    I kept her intellectuals in a state of exercise.
    --De Quincey.

  2. A learned person or one of high intelligence; especially, one who places greatest value on activities requiring exercise of the intelligence, such as study, complex forms of knowledge, literature and aesthetic matters, reflection and philosophical speculation; a member of the intelligentsia; as, intellectuals are often apalled at the inanities that pass for entertainment on television.

Intellectual

Intellectual \In`tel*lec"tu*al\ (?; 135), a. [L. intellectualis: cf. F. intellectuel.]

  1. Belonging to, or performed by, the intellect; mental; as, intellectual powers, activities, etc.

    Logic is to teach us the right use of our reason or intellectual powers.
    --I. Watts.

  2. Endowed with intellect; having the power of understanding; having capacity for the higher forms of knowledge or thought; characterized by intelligence or mental capacity; as, an intellectual person.

    Who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through eternity?
    --Milton.

  3. Suitable for exercising the intellect; formed by, and existing for, the intellect alone; perceived by the intellect; as, intellectual employments.

  4. Relating to the understanding; treating of the mind; as, intellectual philosophy, sometimes called ``mental'' philosophy.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
intellectual

late 14c., "grasped by the understanding" (rather than by the senses), from Old French intellectuel and directly from Latin intellectualis "relating to the understanding," from intellectus "discernment, understanding," from past participle stem of intelligere "to understand, discern" (see intelligence). Intellectual property attested from 1845. Other adjective formations included intellective (late 15c.), intellectile (1670s).

intellectual

1590s, "mind, intellect," from intellectual (adj.); sense of "an intellectual person" is from 1650s. Related: Intellectuals.

Wiktionary
intellectual

a. 1 Belonging to, or performed by, the intellect; mental or cognitive; as, intellectual powers, activities, etc. 2 Endowed with intellect; having the power of understanding; having capacity for the higher forms of knowledge or thought; characterized by intelligence or mental capacity; as, an intellectual person. 3 Suitable for exercise the intellect; formed by, and existing for, the intellect alone; perceived by the intellect; as, intellectual employments. 4 Relating to the understanding; treating of the mind; as, intellectual philosophy, sometimes called "mental" philosophy. 5 (context archaic poetic English) spiritual. n. 1 An intelligent, learned person, especially one who discourses about learned matters. 2 (context archaic English) The intellect or understanding; mental powers or faculties.

Related phrases:
WordNet
intellectual

n. a person who uses the mind creatively [syn: intellect]

intellectual

  1. adj. of or relating to the intellect; "his intellectual career"

  2. of or associated with or requiring the use of the mind; "intellectual problems"; "the triumph of the rational over the animal side of man" [syn: rational, noetic]

  3. appealing to or using the intellect; "satire is an intellectual weapon"; "intellectual workers engaged in creative literary or artistic or scientific labor"; "has tremendous intellectual sympathy for oppressed people"; "coldly intellectual"; "sort of the intellectual type"; "intellectual literature" [ant: nonintellectual]

  4. involving intelligence rather than emotions or instinct; "a cerebral approach to the problem"; "cerebral drama" [syn: cerebral] [ant: emotional]

Related phrases:
Wikipedia
Intellectual

An intellectual is a person who engages in critical study, thought, and reflection about the reality of society, and proposes solutions for the normative problems of that society, and, by such discourse in the public sphere, he or she gains authority within the public opinion. Coming from the world of culture, either as a creator or as a mediator, the intellectual participates in politics, either to defend a concrete proposition or to denounce an injustice, usually by producing or by extending an ideology, and by defending a system of values.

Socially, intellectuals constitute the intelligentsia, a status class organised either by ideology ( conservative, fascist, socialist, liberal, reactionary, revolutionary, democratic, communist intellectuals, et al.), or by nationality (American intellectuals, French intellectuals, Ibero–American intellectuals, et al.). The contemporary intellectual class originated from the intelligentsiya of Tsarist Russia (ca. 1860s–70s), the social stratum of those possessing intellectual formation (schooling, education, Enlightenment), and who were Russian society's counterpart to the German Bildungsbürgertum and to the French bourgeoisie éclairée, the enlightened middle classes of those realms.

During the late 19th century, amidst the Dreyfus affair (1894–1906), an identity crisis of anti-semitic nationalism for the French Third Republic (1870–1940), the reactionary anti–Dreyfusards ( Maurice Barrès, Ferdinand Brunetière, et al.) used the terms intellectual and the intellectuals to deride the liberal Dreyfusards ( Émile Zola, Octave Mirbeau, Anatole France, et al.) as political dilettantes from the realms of French culture, art, and science, who had become involved in politics, by publicly advocating for the exoneration and liberation of Alfred Dreyfus, a French artillery captain of Jewish descent who was falsely accused of betraying France to Germany.

In the 20th century, the term Intellectual acquired positive connotations of social prestige, derived from possessing intellect and intelligence, especially when the intellectual's activities exerted positive consequences in the public sphere and so increased the intellectual understanding of the public, by means of moral responsibility, altruism, and solidarity, without resorting to the manipulations of populism, paternalism, and incivility (condescension). Hence, for the educated person of a society, participating in the public sphere — the political affairs of the city-state — is a civic responsibility dating from the Græco–Latin Classical era:

The determining factor for a thinker (historian, philosopher, scientist, writer, artist, et al.) to be considered a public intellectual is the degree to which he or she is implicated and engaged with the vital reality of the contemporary world; that is to say, participation in the public affairs of society. Consequently, being designated as a public intellectual is determined by the degree of influence of the designator's motivations, opinions, and options of action (social, political, ideological), and by affinity with the given thinker; therefore:

Analogously, the application and the conceptual value of the terms Intellectual and the Intellectuals are socially negative when the practice of intellectuality is exclusively in service to The Establishment who wield power in a society, as such:

Noam Chomsky’s negative view of the Establishment Intellectual suggests the existence of another kind of intellectual one might call "the public intellectual," which is

Related phrases:

Usage examples of "intellectual".

intellectual-Principle, the veritable, abiding and not fluctuant since not taking intellectual quality from outside itself.

Actualization is predicable in the Intellectual Realm and whether all is in Actualization there, each and every member of that realm being an Act, or whether Potentiality also has place there.

But after what mode does Actualization exist in the Intellectual Realm?

Then, everything, in the intellectual is in actualization and so all There is Actuality?

This feeling alone would make your most kind and wise admonitions, on the subject of the economy of intellectual force, valuable to me.

The Aenean intellectual community took little serious interest in the undercultures on its own planet.

But how does the soul enter into body from the aloofness of the Intellectual?

Between the name, the ancestry, the manner, the looks, the charm, the ease and the intellectual ability, whatever election Caesar contested would see him returned at the top of the poll.

The Indian issue makes a certain amount of stir here, but less than one would expect because all the big newspapers have conspired to misrepresent it and the Indian intellectuals in this country go out of their way to antagonize those likeliest to help them.

Principle not dwelling in the higher regions, one not powerful enough to ensure the permanence of the existences in which it is exhibited, one which in its coming into being and in its generative act is but an imitation of an antecedent Kind, and, as we have shown, cannot at every point possess the unchangeable identity of the Intellectual Realm.

There is not simply an inquiry as to the value of classic culture, a certain jealousy of the schools where it is obtained, a rough popular contempt for the graces of learning, a failure to see any connection between the first aorist and the rolling of steel rails, but there is arising an angry protest against the conditions of a life which make one free of the serene heights of thought and give him range of all intellectual countries, and keep another at the spade and the loom, year after year, that he may earn food for the day and lodging for the night.

Chopin, who was not very intellectual, felt ill at ease amongst all these literary men, these reformers, arguers and speechifiers.

One of the few intellectuals who could articulate, in abstract terms, the pragmatic motivations of the man from Prince Albert was Roy Faibish, who served through270 Exercise of Power out most of the Diefenbaker Years as special assistant to Alvin Hamilton.

It is a principle with us that one who has attained to the vision of the Intellectual Beauty and grasped the beauty of the Authentic Intellect will be able also to come to understand the Father and Transcendent of that Divine Being.

Intellectual-Principle by means of which she has attained the vision, herself made over into Intellectual-Principle and becoming that principle so as to be able to take stand in that Intellectual space.